Humankind, the tried through OpenDev
Because this is the purpose of OpenDev, to figure out what to fix, especially considering that Hunkind has been postponed, and the SEGA affiliated studio has plenty of time to fix it.
h2> Lucy, a multifaceted leader One of the things that struck us most about Humankind is the way she manages civilizations. A perspective that overturns that of Civilization, a game in which you choose a leader at the beginning of the game and carry him around for millennia. In Humankind, on the other hand, we will start with a handful of nomadic tribes who will have to search the territory for the first information and the first resources to be able to move from wandering to sedentary life.
Once you have found all the information requested, you can found the first city and with it choose the first civilization to be inspired by. Each civilization will have specific bonuses and units, so we can choose the one that best fits the territory on which we found ourselves. In Civ it can happen to choose the Vikings or the Venetians and find yourself in the middle of an arid continent. A situation that does not allow you to use many of the most powerful bonuses of that civilization, an unpredictable thing that could create more than a problem.
In Humankind, however, we will be able to choose after a handful of turns which civilization to be. The Phoenicians if there are nearby coasts or the Mesopotamian civilizations if you are close to rivers. In the same way, with the passage of the era you can choose how to progress, or whether to further enhance the chosen civilization or whether to turn to another, more suitable for the evolution of the game.
Are the enemies aggressive? Better to take a people with some military bonus. Are the soils fertile? We turn to one that has buildings and bonuses suitable for expansion. In this way, during the game we will find ourselves customizing our leader in the preferred way, accumulating from time to time the bonuses considered most useful.
Diplomacy, religion and wonders
Two new elements of this Lucy OpenDev are diplomacy and religion. The first makes it possible to establish a system of more or less bellicose relations with neighbors, forging alliances, establishing commercial treaties or resolving crises. These moments occur when one of the two parties does something not very nice towards the neighbor, such as building a short distance from the borders. In this case a window will automatically open giving you some options to scrape away the rust between the parts.Religion, on the other hand, works in a similar way to Civilization 6. Once you have founded a creed you will have to choose the bonuses that this will award. Except that instead of the Apostles, in order to level up one's religion, the holy place must be improved. To do this we need to start a "collective project" between the different cities, in which we will decide which city can participate in the construction of this place. We can choose to engage all of our population centers, blocking the expansion for a few turns, or to select only a handful of metropolises while the others are busy with new districts or with the construction of units.
This same procedure it is also used for wonders: it is not the effort of a single city, but a work in whose construction the whole nation participates. To understand how wonderful to build you must first "redeem" it with culture points. Then, once positioned on our territory, we will have to commit resources to its construction.
Fights, AI, problems
As we said in the previous preview of Humankind, the game's combat system it is a clear step up from Civilization 6. Whenever there is a discount the game enters a mini instance in which you have to deploy the units on the ground and then fight the opponents. This is a choice that makes the fight very tactical, because the final result does not depend only on the strength of the unit.A tank will always win against an archer, but a group of scouts could sell their skin dearly if placed in an elevated location. It is, therefore, a great variety of situations and not a simple "this is stronger than this, so I win" which in our opinion would require a revision of the interface in order to clarify the types of units involved, but above all if you have advantages over one unit or another. As it is, it is sometimes difficult to read the battle correctly.
Another problem is that AI doesn't seem particularly shrewd and often doesn't use height correctly or has a propensity to attack head-on. More variety could help in this regard. The game's artificial intelligence, in our opinion, is currently the weakest element of the whole production. It is true that it is very dry and non-invasive, but it is often unclear and not very fluid and does not accompany the game as CIV 6 does. , thus minimizing downtime.
We also had some difficulty with the pointer, which sometimes did not take command and sometimes required reselecting drives. However, we found the controls to be unintuitive and a bit confusing. Nothing to worry about, but let's say that in recent years there have been great strides from this point of view and we would like this aspect to live up to the rest.
We still like Humankind. Amplitude is a studio with talent and experience and it shows. It's a Civilization without being a Civ, a game that takes many of the series' most celebrated mechanics and reworks, improves, and transforms them to create an interesting and intelligent game. A 4X with excellent potential, which we can't wait to see in its entirety. With a better interface, more developed AI and a few more options for trading, SEGA's game could really beat it on par with Civilization 6 on its own turf.
